Imani Tafari-Ama | US immigration policy and the old wounds of separation

What if you had invested approximately US$1,500 to apply for an immigrant visa – or US$500 for a non-immigrant visa – believing that this was your lawful passage from a constrained local economy into the promise of opportunity in the Global North?

What if you had spent years assembling documents, paying lawyers, undergoing medicals, and navigating interviews, only to be stopped mid-journey by a presidential announcement suspending the processing of permanent visas? How would you feel? What would you do next? And if your family was waiting in the emotional wilderness for an embassy decision - parents, spouses, children - only to have that outcome ruptured before it could come to fruition, what recourse would truly be available to you?

These questions sit at the intersection of policy, power, and pain. Recent developments in United States foreign and immigration policy have once again exposed the fragility of the long-standing dependence that many Caribbean and Global South societies have been forced to maintain on this superpower for economic direction, security validation, and even the right to mobility. It is not only the overt military threats or economic sanctions that undermine national autonomy. It is also the quieter, “administrative” acts of soft power – such as the cancellation or suspension of immigration and visa processing for dozens of countries, including Jamaica- that fracture families, derail futures, and reproduce historical patterns of dispossession.

For decades, migration to the United States has been woven into the survival strategies of Caribbean households. It has been encouraged, normalised, and in many cases, economically engineered. Remittances prop up national economies. Migrant labour fills critical gaps in US healthcare, agriculture, hospitality, and logistics sectors. Yet when political expediency demands it, those same migrants and applicants are rendered disposable, reduced to case numbers frozen in bureaucratic limbo.

DEVASTATING

The financial cost alone is devastating. For many applicants, US$1,500 represents years of savings, community pooling, or debt. It is school fees deferred, land left idle, medical care postponed. When processing is abruptly halted, there is no refund for hope, no compensation for time, no acknowledgement of the emotional and economic investment extracted from already vulnerable populations. The loss is borne entirely by the applicant while the state that imposed the rule change absorbs no accountability.

But the deeper injury is not financial. It is relational. Immigration suspensions guarantee family separation on a mass scale. They interrupt reunification processes mid-stream, leaving children growing up without parents, elders ageing without care, and couples trapped on opposite sides of borders they cannot legally cross. This is not collateral damage. It is the predictable outcome of policies that treat human connection as negotiable.

History makes this repetition especially painful. Caribbean people know this story. During centuries of enslavement, families were routinely separated- sold, shipped, and scattered with impunity. Emotional support systems were deliberately dismantled to maximise control and extraction. Today’s immigration bans and processing freezes do not operate with chains and auction blocks, but the logic of disposability is hauntingly familiar. Families are once again treated as expendable units in service of imperial priorities.

What makes this moment particularly instructive is how it reveals the illusion of stability that has underpinned US-centric development models. For too long, Caribbean nations have been encouraged to organise their economic, educational, and even aspirational systems around access to the United States. Migration pathways became pressure valves for unemployment. Diasporas became informal welfare systems. Yet when the valve is abruptly shut, the underlying vulnerability is laid bare.

NECESSARY QUESTIONS

This should force difficult but necessary questions. What does sovereignty mean if a single foreign executive decision can upend thousands of Caribbean lives overnight? What does “partnership” mean when the costs of policy shifts are externalised entirely onto smaller nations and poorer families? And why are these measures so often justified in the language of national security when their real impact is social and psychological devastation?

The silence that frequently greets these policy actions is also telling. Immigration suspensions are framed as technical adjustments, not human rights concerns. There is little space for affected communities to appeal, negotiate, or even be heard. Legal recourse is limited, expensive, and slow. Diplomatic responses are often muted, constrained by aid dependencies and geopolitical fear.

Yet this moment also carries a lesson – and an opportunity. The repeated weaponisation of mobility should compel Caribbean governments and civil society to rethink the wisdom of overreliance on any single external power. Regional integration, South-South cooperation, and investment in local economic resilience are no longer abstract ideals. They are survival imperatives. So, too, is the assertion that migration is not a privilege to be arbitrarily granted or withdrawn but a human reality shaped by historical extraction, unequal development, and global responsibility.

For individuals caught in the current suspension, the question of “What next?” remains painfully unresolved. Some will wait, suspended in uncertainty. Some will lose their savings and abandon the process altogether. Others will seek alternative destinations, repeating the cycle elsewhere. None of these outcomes can be described as just.

Ultimately, the abrupt halting of visa processing is not merely an immigration issue. It is a mirror held up to the unequal global order, one in which the lives and futures of people in the Global South can be paused, redirected, or discarded at will. Until this imbalance is named, challenged, and repaired, the promise of mobility will remain conditional, and the wounds of separation – old and new – will continue to reopen.

Imani Tafari-Ama, PhD, is a Pan-African advocate and gender and development specialist. Send feedback to i.tafariama@gmail.com and columns@gleanerjm.com.